Recently, digital multifunctional devices with high performance have been commercially available and accordingly it is easy to form images of products such as books so as to form copies similar to originals. Further, when images of the books and the like are read and made into image data, recent prevalence of the Internet allows distribution of the image data to unspecified number of users.
Although books and the like are protected under copyrights, there frequently occurs such damage that the images of the books and the like are read and made into image data and distributed without permission of copyright holders. In order to prevent such illegal distribution of image data, there is proposed a technology disclosed in Japanese Unexamined Patent Publication No. 62870/2004 (published on Feb. 26, 2004: Document 1) for example.
To be specific, Document 1 discloses a system in which: permitting conditions under which a user can use desired contents data are informed to a server storing the contents data, and when the server permits the contents data to be used under the permitting conditions, the user can receive the contents data from the server, thereby allowing personal use of the contents data and preventing illegal copy of the contents data. In this way, in the case of digitalized products, there is proposed a system which allows copy of the contents data only when the contents data are personally used.
On the other hand, in the case where products have physical forms such as books, an example of a technique for preventing illegal copy of the books with a copying machine is disclosed in Japanese Unexamined Patent Publication No. 164551/2004 (published on Jun. 10, 2004: Document 2) for example.
Document 2 discloses a technique in which: in a storage medium attached to a book, information indicating whether copy of the book is allowable or not is stored, and copy of the book is controlled based on the information.
Further, in the technique disclosed in Document 2, when it is judged that there is no user information in the storage medium attached to the book, user information is written in the storage medium before an image of the book is copied.
However, with the conventional arrangements, it is impossible to prevent illegal copy of images of products having physical forms such as books while normally copying images of the books.
To be specific, in Document 2, in the storage medium attached to a book, information indicating whether copy of the book is allowable or not is stored, and copy of the book is controlled based on the information. In this case, for example, even the owner of the book is disallowed to copy images of the book. Namely, in Document 2, whether image reading is allowable or not is set regardless of whether the person who is to perform image reading is the legal owner of the book or not.
Further, in the technique disclosed in Document 2, when it is judged that there is no user information in the storage medium attached to the book, user information is written in the storage medium before an image of the book is copied. Next time the image of the book is to be copied, whether copy of the image is allowable or not is determined based on the user information. At that time, when an illegal user, who is not a legal owner of the book in which the user information is not stored, copies the image of the book, user information concerning the illegal user is automatically written in a storage medium attached to the book. When the legal owner of the book attempts to copy the image of the book after the user information concerning the illegal user has been written, the legal owner cannot copy the image of the book. Namely, in the technique disclosed in Document 2, when user information is not stored in the storage medium attached to the book, user information is automatically stored in the storage medium regardless of whether the user information concerns the legal owner or not and then copy of the image is performed. As a result, illegal copy of the image cannot be prevented.